Troubling times: the sorrows and rewards of reporting Northern Ireland

A new book has just come my way. Reporting the Troubles brings together the stories of journalists who covered 30 years of civil conflict in Northern Ireland. It was edited by two outstanding practitioners of the reporting trade, Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, and is a valuable addition to the great body of published work on those sad times and the struggle to achieve and then maintain what the late Mo Mowlam, when NI secretary, used to call a 'flawed peace' ...

Just over half a century ago, an October Saturday in the city of Derry began in unseasonal sunshine but degenerated into deep gloom with a shameful attack by baton-wielding RUC officers on civil rights marchers.

Awful an event as this was, no one present is likely to have guessed that he or she was witnessing what many feel was the starting point of 30 years of bloody conflict in, according to taste or allegiance, Northern Ireland, Ulster, the Six Counties or simply "the North".

I was already a young reporter, but covering much more mundane matters from a district office of the Evening Despatch, a newspaper published in Darlington, County Durham. I visited Northern Ireland around that time, first hitchhiking - guitar on my back - with my then girlfriend, later to see her successor, a Queen's student I'd met on the Isle of Man (holiday for me, holiday job for her).

But throughout those 30 years, and since, I would return over and again to report on the grinding succession of terrorist atrocities, their aftermaths, controversies over the actions of security forces and all the political shenanigans.

The subject, its past and its present, gripped me in a way no other has in a long journalistic career. I made a large number of friends, developed contacts on both sides of the loyalist/nationalist divide (and in the rare middle ground) and came to find each professional visit hugely rewarding despite the human tragedies that so often occurred while I was there or caused me to go.

So frequent were my trips that I even created a social life away from the job, joining a badminton club a few miles outside Belfast at Lisburn to which I could occasionally retreat if work did not get in the way. In part, this was a healthy option to the strong drinking culture that dominated non-working parts of our days, but I also welcomed the chance to talk to ordinary people with whom I shared a sporting interest.

In common with the men and women whose own recollections of specific assignments or periods fill the pages of this book, I have abiding memories of countless occasions when people had been shot or bombed or were being buried, or were on trial for doing that shooting and bombing, and of the endless stream of political talks that searched for ways of bringing Mo Mowlam's flawed peace.

People were friendly and open in the least obvious and darkest of moments. Access to important, shady or grieving individuals was often easier †o obtain than might have been expected. And there was just enough levity (and, important for me in any part of Ireland, music) to brighten the bleak social and political landscape.

The names of much-admired colleagues leap from the list of contributors and their memories make for compelling reads.

I was greatly moved by Susan McKay's account of visiting and then befriending the grief-stricken parents of a Catholic boy of 16 murdered by a drunken savage who belonged to the Orange Order.

Richard Kay, better known as the Daily Mail's well-connected columnist and writer on the royals but once its man in Northern Ireland, tells the heartbreaking story of a Catholic family attacked by a ruthless IRA gang as they left Mass. Sam Travers was the target because he served as a magistrate. He was shot six times but survived, his wife lived because her would-be killer's gun jammed but their daughter, a much-loved teacher in the very nationalist Andersonstown district, died. Kay lived nearby and tells a horrible story with eloquence.

Deric Henderson remembers hair-raising helicopter flights with Margaret Thatcher (and not hair-raising only because her ferocious press secretary, Bernard Ingham, was with them). My friend and former colleague Sean O'Neill, from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, talks of the awkwardness and discomfort of being an Irish reporter among the British press pack.

But with some of the individual chapters still to read, I was reluctant to mention even those because there are so many strong, heartfelt contributions*.

Gail Walker, an excellent reporter I met met fleetingly many years ago, is now the editor of the Belfast Telegraph, the paper she also worked for back then. She provides a necessary response to the familiar caricature of reporters as "hard-hearted, feckless, amoral villains".

"In some ways, I didn't - don't - want to remember any of it," she writes of her part in the book. "Which is not to say that one ever forgets. I don't know any journalist who worked through the Troubles, with its relentless cycle of murders and doorstepping the homes of the dead and funerals and yet more murders, who isn't haunted form time to time by being an eyewitness to evil, to heartache and, yes, to courage too."

Only a handful of quarrels arise. A pedant would say one or two of the contributions demonstrate the value of that dying journalistic breed, a good sub.

And names that ought to have been among the storytellers were missing, though I realise some may have been asked and were unable to oblige.

Maybe there is scope for a second volume of this illuminating and dignified, if often harrowing, work.

* One or two names and references have been added as I have completed my reading of the book since this article was first posted.

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Troubling times: the sorrows and rewards of reporting Northern Ireland

A new book has just come my way. Reporting the Troubles brings together the stories of journalists who covered 30 years of civil conflict in Northern Ireland. It was edited by two outstanding practitioners of the reporting trade, Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, and is a valuable addition to the great body of published work on those sad times and the struggle to achieve and then maintain what the late Mo Mowlam, when NI secretary, used to call a 'flawed peace' ...

Just over half a century ago, an October Saturday in the city of Derry began in unseasonal sunshine but degenerated into deep gloom with a shameful attack by baton-wielding RUC officers on civil rights marchers.

Awful an event as this was, no one present is likely to have guessed that he or she was witnessing what many feel was the starting point of 30 years of bloody conflict in, according to taste or allegiance, Northern Ireland, Ulster, the Six Counties or simply "the North".